The original Need For Speed was a groundbreaking game. Realistic vehicles, physics, handling and sound all raised the bar for racing games for many years. The rendering of backgrounds and track design were unmatched and The Need For Speed became a major brand for Electronic Arts.

Markus was the Lead Artist for this game and guided the art team to create features not yet seen on console games. In addition to leading the art team, Markus was responsible for modelling and surfacing all the vehicles in the game.

One of the joys of being lead artist, is tailoring the assets to match personal interests."I couldn't resist using my family car as one of the traffic cars. I'd hunt it down and try to take it out with the sports car!". The car to the right of the Lamborgini Diablo is the Tessmann's family car, a Nissan Access!

Tech Notes

Originally, the sports cars in The Need For Speed were going to be 2D bitmaps,
as seen in games like Outrun and Road Rash!
To convince EA of the possibility of 3D cars, Markus (with outside help from a programming friend)
developed a proof-of-concept showing that with few polygons and a special texture mapping approach,
realistic 3D cars were feasable. After that, the EA Canada tools group got on-side and the cars you see here became possible.

The in-game sports cars could each have only about 64 triangles
and the traffic cars about 24 triangles! Markus modelled the cars in high resolution and developed a
custom texture projection technique using the high poly vehicle models to create low resolution textures.

Road & Track Presents: The Need For Speed was ported to many gaming platforms including the PC and Playstation.